


Old Junk

by bomberqueen17



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-09
Updated: 2013-08-08
Packaged: 2017-12-22 21:26:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/918201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bomberqueen17/pseuds/bomberqueen17
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A story about rings, in two parts. Ties in with my other works in SG:A fandom, but is not a direct sequel or prequel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Make This A Thing

Nancy was absorbed in the book she was reading. It was her sole English elective, the one literature class she’d let herself take in this entire year. Everything else was law, law, law, hammering home the legalese. This one class was letting her read books and write papers. She was treating it as an incredibly intense vacation. 

And it was a damn good place to hide— inside a book was a wonderful insulated shell where she could ignore the fact that very soon, her boyfriend, her increasingly-solidly-really-an-important-boyfriend, was going to vanish for an indefinite period of months, perhaps a year, flying jets in a warzone. She was trying very, very hard not to count down the days until he vanished, but the only sure-fire way to do that was to keep her nose in the book. 

Finally she noticed that John was moping. It was, she supposed, a fine day outside, and it was also, she supposed, one of few such days they had left together, before he left; it was rare that they both had the day off, and he undoubtedly had hoped to do something fun today. She didn’t have the day off-off; she had to finish the book, for school. But it would probably not be too much to ask for her to put it down for a couple of hours and go do something for the afternoon.

She sighed, and stuck the folded-up assignment sheet into the book, and said, “What?” as she let the pages flop closed.

John looked up innocently, expectantly, like a dog. “Huh?”

“You want to go somewhere,” she said. “Or do something.”

He rolled over and sat up. She was in the armchair, he was on the floor; he’d been pacing, then he’d cleaned the already-clean kitchen (he cleaned when he had a lot of days off, and she hated to admit she loved it, but right now she could’ve eaten off that floor and it was _amazing_ ), then he’d paced some more, and recently he’d flopped down on the floor and taken to staring out the sliding glass door to the back patio. “Yeah?” he said, a little tentatively. 

“I have this urge to tousle your ears and call you a good boy and fetch your leash,” Nancy said with a laugh. “Why are you on the floor?”

“Cuz,” he offered, which she knew meant he had no reason he could articulate. It didn’t mean there was no reason, it just meant he didn’t have words for it. He pushed to his feet and paced a little circle around the room. “I dunno,” he said, “you wanna do something?”

He was oddly hyper, she reflected. “Well,” she said, “you obviously don’t really want to sit around here. I gotta finish this reading by tonight, and a paper on it by Monday, but I can kill some time if you’re bored.”

He shrugged. “I mean,” he said, “I, well, I know you have a lot to do.” He was still pacing. He seemed… unsettled. Nervous. 

“Is something wrong?” she asked. “John, are you OK?”

He noticed he was pacing, made himself stop, came back and sat on the floor next to the chair. There was definitely tension in his spine, his neck, the way he held his head. “Yeah,” he said, “I’m fine, I was just— well…” 

“What?” she asked. 

He turned and looked up at her for a long moment, biting his lips, then shoved back to his feet. “Hey,” he said, “I think I’m gonna, you know what, maybe go for a run.” He jerked his thumb toward the door.

“You went for a run this morning,” she said. He’d been gone when she woke, gone for nearly an hour, and she’d noticed his legs shaking when he came back; he ran all the time so he’d have to have really pushed hard this morning to get that effect. Hard enough that going for a second run was probably a terrible idea.

“Oh yeah,” he said, subsiding. He sat back down, put his back against the chair, stared resolutely out the glass door again. 

Nancy sighed and pushed to her feet, leaving the book in the chair. “C’mon,” she said, “there’s a carnival in town with a midway, let’s go and see if you can win me a teddy bear or something.”

John’s face lit up. “Hey,” he said, “I love that shit.”

“You drive,” she said, “I’ll finish reading in the car.” 

 

Nancy put on a cute sundress, cute enough that John teased her and called her Fancy Nancy and she had to swat him, and they walked through the carnival like a regular guy and a regular girl, fingers twined together and arms swinging, faces turning up to the sun, just happy. Not like a girl whose boyfriend was going to go fly planes in a dangerous far-off desert for a really long time starting very soon. Not thinking about that, not at all.

They talked through her idea for her paper, John offering good suggestions— he’d minored in English and was a really good writer, concise and efficient. She bought him fried dough, insisting on paying for it, and not for the first time she reflected on his oddness about money, like buying him something was some kind of touchy insult. In return, he went to the first carnival game that involved shooting things, and shot an entirely flawless round to win her a distressingly goofy stuffed panda bear. 

“I don’t think he’s supposed to be this goofy,” Nancy said. 

“What’s wrong with being goofy?” John asked. 

“I mean, I don’t think he’s intentionally like this,” Nancy said. “Also I think he’s stuffed with mildewed sawdust.”

“Well,” John said, “I can go win you another one, but I don’t think they’re gonna let me play many more rounds.” The carnie had been a little suspicious of John from the get-go, and had not been thrilled by any of the proceedings, especially not when John had immediately adapted to the skewed sights on the fake gun.

“Oh,” Nancy said, sliding her hand around John’s waist, getting her thumb up under the hem of his t-shirt to hook it into his jeans waistband, rubbing the side of it a little against the bare skin at his hip, “I know he was the nicest one there. I like him just fine, I’m just observing his goofiness.”

John laughed at that, arm settling around her shoulders, and she took him over to the midway. “Let’s go on a ride. Do you like rollercoasters?”

He cast an eye over the rides, squinting thoughtfully and chewing his lip. “Sure,” he said.

“I like Ferris wheels,” she said, sliding away a little bit and catching his hand as it came down from her shoulders. She grinned at him. “You can make out on those.”

He laughed, at that, and said, “Fair enough. They’ve always been my favorite, but that reason never even struck me.” 

“You just don’t have the right kind of imagination,” Nancy said. 

They worked their way down the line of rides, the silly little rollercoaster and the Scrambler and the merry-go-round and the Tilt-A-Whirl, and Nancy got dizzy and made them go sit down in the food court. John bought them hot dogs; somehow, in his internal reckoning, it was his turn to buy and he wouldn’t be dissuaded or go halfsies. As a dinner went, it wasn’t bad. They went over her paper again and she finally got the thesis squared away in her head, and the conclusion. 

“It’s getting late,” Nancy said finally. “We should head back so I can get started writing this damn paper.”

“Not til we go on that Ferris wheel,” John said. 

She grinned at him, raising an eyebrow. “Oh yeah?”

“Yeah,” he said, and got to his feet, pulling her up. She remembered to retrieve the panda, and laughed at him as he pulled her down the line of rides to the giant wheel at a pace that was almost a jog. 

“You’re awfully excited about this ride,” she said. 

“I’ve been looking forward to it all day,” he answered, and they got in line. Nancy had time to wonder when she’d become the kind of girl who giggled. It was John’s bad influence, and she laughed and said so, but it made her somber; soon he’d be gone, and there’d be nobody to make her laugh. 

“I don’t really know what I’m gonna do without you,” she said, and looked sadly up at him. “I’m a really shitty long-distance girlfriend. I don’t really… it’s not something I really… _do_.”

John chewed his lips briefly, and wiped his hands on his jeans, looking uneasy. “I’m not much good at it either,” he confessed. 

“This is gonna _suck_ ,” she said forcefully, and it was worse because she’d managed not to think about it for most of the afternoon. She held the stupid panda against her chest and crossed her arms over it. “Damn you, John Sheppard.”

He fidgeted, eyes sliding away from her. “I mean,” he said, to something to her left and about waist level, “I guess, we don’t have to do this.”

“Do what?” she asked. 

“Be long-distance,” he said. 

She blinked at him. “What, you’re gonna not go?” It wasn’t even possible, she knew that.

“No,” he said, and fidgeted a bit more, even more nervous. She couldn’t read his expression, but it was clear that there was suddenly a whole lot riding on the conversation. “I know, I mean, it’s really…” His eyes slid up to her face but back down and away before she could really register whatever it was he was emoting. “It’s, if you, I mean, you know?”

Her chest had gone paralyzingly tight. Wait, was he _dumping_ her? She made herself move a hand, reach out, touch his arm, and he flinched, then looked up at her, and his expression was flickering between absolutely beseeching and shutting-down blank. “Those were words, baby, but they didn’t make a sentence,” she said gently, numbly. “I don’t know what you’re asking me.” _Say it, you asshole. If you’re dumping me, at least fucking say it._

He steeled himself, blank, but with an edge of desperation beneath. “If you want I can, uh, put my stuff in, uh, in storage while, while I’m gone,” he said finally. “I still get my housing allowance so, um, I, um, I’ll still just forward that, um, to you for the rent. But if you find a different roommate or something, or want to… to uh, to… move on… then that’s, that’s, uh, that’s OK.” 

She almost shrieked _what the fuck_ and hit him, and the impulse was overwhelming, but she put her arm carefully back across her chest, squeezing the life out of the goddamn stuffed panda, took a breath, let it out, and said, “Do you want me to do that?”

His jaw moved; his teeth were gritted, she could tell. “No,” he said, as if it tore its way out despite himself, and the desperation was invisible but audible.

She laughed, almost bitter, incredulous. “Then I won’t, John. Jesus. I said I wasn’t good at being a long-distance girlfriend, not that I wasn’t going to do it. I don’t have a choice, not really. Not if I want you. Which I do.” She looked at him, and he managed to look back at her, and there was just something so fragile behind his blank face, something worn-down and broken and raw. “John, I’ll be here when you get back, I’ll be waiting for you, and I’ll even try to be good and write to you, I’m just not very good at it. Of course I’ll do it, for you.”

He stared at her, perfectly blank now, nothing at all visible, and the person behind them in line said, “Are you getting on the ride or what?”

“Come on,” Nancy said gently, taking his hands and pulling him up the steps and into the swinging little car, and he stared at her like she was a ghost as the carnie put the bar down over their laps and chained it in place. 

The wheel turned just enough for the next car to load up, and John said, finally, “Really?”

“Really, John,” Nancy said. His expression didn’t change and he didn’t make a sound, but he sucked in his breath and leaned over and suddenly his mouth was on hers and his arms were around her and Nancy happily melted to him and wondered how far it was possible to go while chained in to a Ferris wheel car. 

His heart was pounding, she could feel it in his chest under her fingertips; she slid her other hand up the back of his shirt and felt the smooth skin of his back, the hard muscle underneath, and lost herself in the clean scent of his body, the way he took on the smell of the sunshine. 

“I thought you were trying to dump me,” she said as the wheel began to move in earnest, all the passengers loaded on. 

“The opposite,” he said, grinning like an idiot, too happy to be sheepish. 

“You’re not very good at this,” she pointed out. 

“No,” he admitted. They reached the top of the wheel, seeming to hang for a moment even though the momentum was unvaried, and she shrieked with laughter as they suddenly began their descent; she grabbed the bar and John put his arm around her and he was laughing too. They started to swing up the back of the ride and he kissed her again.

A couple more times around the wheel, and he said, “So, you wanna make this a thing?”

“What?” Making out on the Ferris wheel? It wasn’t bad, as things went, but the carnival wasn’t in town all that often. Plus Ferris wheels were okay but not great for making out; you couldn’t sit in each other’s laps or even really face each other, so there wasn’t far you could comfortably go. 

“Us,” he said, and he was nervous again, she could feel it in his body, the strange thrumming tension beneath his stillness. He pulled back a little and stared at her, oddly intense. 

“Us,” she said. “A thing. What?”

He shifted, pulling his hand away, and she realized he was digging in his pocket. Was this going to make sense anytime soon? “Us,” he repeated, as if repetition would somehow make it clearer, “A thing. Like, a real, official thing.”

He produced a little box, rounded with maroon flocking, and Nancy’s heart might have stopped when she realized it was a little jewelry box, the kind you had a ring in. This was— this was like a movie, this was not really a thing people did. Not to her. Not in her life. “Oh, Christ,” she said, shocked, dragging in a breath.

He handed her the box. “Like a real thing like with paperwork and stuff,” he said. 

She stared at the box, then his face, and he looked nervous and scratched the back of his head. “I mean, we don’t have to,” he said. “I just, I just thought maybe—“

She grabbed his neck and dragged him into an awkward embrace. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, John, yes, I will. Yes. We can. Yes.”  She hadn’t expected, hadn’t planned, hadn’t even thought; her detailed plans for adulthood had always included getting married someday but she’d always just planned on finishing grad school and starting her career and finding someone then, once she was done with the other stuff. She’d been sowing her wild oats in grad school, picking up rakish-looking boys in bars, and really hadn’t planned on the one she brought home staying there. 

He laughed and kissed her, all the tension going out of his body, hands warm on her shoulders as the air whooshed past them, the tug and pull of gravity as they rotated, high above the air, floating, then falling, then sweeping backward so close to the ground, then flying upward again, and his mouth was hot and alive and eager on hers, and they were flying together. 

The wheel slowed, and finally stopped, and the chain rattled and the carnie said, “Break it up, kids.”

Nancy laughed, and John sprang to his feet and pulled her up as the bar lifted, and said, “You didn’t even look at the ring.”

She stepped off onto the metal ramp. “Is there really a ring in here?” she asked. “Like you really—“ She found the hand with the box in it, which was at the end of an arm that had wrapped around John again, and looked at the box. “Planned this out and everything.”

The other disembarking passengers were jostling around them, and John said, “Yeah,” staring at her. 

She handed him the box and said “C’mon.” 

He laughed. “You want me to do the thing?” he asked. “Like, with the knees, and everything?” Before she could answer, he dropped down, right in the middle of the crowd, and said, “Nancy, Nancy Callahan, fancy Nancy, will you or won’t you or what?” and flipped the box open.

She was dimly aware that the crowd had all noticed what he was doing and had fallen silent, and even the carnie was looking at them, but she was too busy staring at the ring— she’d been ready to be excited about the kind of little solitaire chip her cohorts getting their Mrs. degree had lately been sporting in this season’s fashionable setting, but this was something else entirely. 

It was gold, an antique-looking yellow gold, with a modest but considerable diamond, a dark blue or black stone almost the same size, and then a milky green stone just a little smaller, all offset from one another in a compact asymmetrical curlicue, vaguely Celtic but almost Art Decoish. She stared at it, tilted it a little to see the brilliance run along the diamond, saw the light move inside the dark stone— blue, blue light— and the sheen through the green one, and said “Oh my God.” Those were real, um, whatever they weres. She looked up at his face, and he was staring anxiously at her. “John,” she said. “It’s— oh my God.”

“It’s old,” he said. “The little old man who sold it to me was very insistent, and I thought it would suit you. I— I know the fashion is for the solitaire ones, with the step cut, but I just never liked those, and they only look good if you have five grand or more for the stone, and I just didn’t. And I don’t want this to look like a joke in twenty years when you’re the senior partner in a law firm and have more money than God. Like, oh, nice diamond chip, you must’ve married an art student when you were a teenager, good going.” 

She laughed, then, and said, “John, you are such a weirdo. It’s perfect.” She caressed the side of his face. “Yes, John Sheppard, I will. Come here, you nut.” She bent and pulled his face up to hers to kiss him. 

He laughed, and stood up, wrapping his arms around her and kissing her deeply. She was dimly aware of a commotion, the crowd around them reacting, and they broke off kissing when someone touched John’s arm. It was the carnie.

“Get back on there, kids,” he said. “I wouldn’t’a stopped ya before if I realized how serious it was.”

John laughed and pulled her back into the cart, and she sat down with him. As the guy chained the bar down over their laps, John pulled the ring out of the box and slid it onto her finger. He’d been fretting about this longer than all day, she thought, looking at his face. He’d been odd and wound-up all week, and she’d figured it was because of the deployment, but— you didn’t just go out and pick something like this up, he had to have been planning this for a long time, and she wasn’t going to ask where he’d gotten the money, it was probably all of the hazard pay from his last round of training, and then some. _Oh John._ Her whole body was still buzzing with shock.

He got stuck at the knuckle, and she pushed it on the rest of the way herself, then regarded him suspiciously.

“How did you know my ring size?” she asked. 

He looked innocent. “I’m good at measuring,” he said. 


	2. Old Junk

Normally Teyla would’ve found something else to do, but it was raining, and she was recovering from the flu— they’d all had it, starting with poor Rodney who was still complaining of being as sick as anyone, and he wasn’t totally wrong, illnesses did seem to linger with him— so on this particular day she was in Sheppard’s quarters, listening to him cough and sniffle and turn the pages of his book very occasionally. 

He’d taken up residence on the couch, so she was sitting on the bed, and had gone from sitting to lying, and now was simply in his bed, in a self-indulgent pile of being ill. Her fever had broken already; his had not, so he kept drifting off into sleep and waking, and while he never complained, she could tell he was miserable. She kept making him tea with the ingenious little electric kettle he had in here, and by now he had four half-finished cups of it gone cold, which she was still feeling too ill to pick up. 

She’d checked on Ronon on her way over here. He was holed up in his room, sleeping it off. He’d gotten sick last and would be recovered first, and in the interim, would hibernate. Rodney was insisting on being in the infirmary and Beckett was being very indulgent of him, though Teyla could tell his patience was starting to wear thin.

The door chime sounded and John snorted awake, dropping his book. Teyla slid from the bed with a murmured reassurance, and he looked blearily around. She opened the door, and it was Beckett, with Rodney. 

“I’m starting to get other flu patients,” Beckett said, “and Rodney’s fever has broken, but he doesn’t want to be left without observation. Someone said Colonel Sheppard had a little recovery room going on in here.”

“He does,” Teyla said. “Rodney, would you like some tea?”

“I can have lunch sent up for you, if any of you are hungry,” Beckett said. John sat up blearily. “Ah, Colonel,” and Beckett stepped into the room. “Let me take your temperature. Has the fever broken?”

“I’m fine,” John said, a little vaguely, and Beckett smiled at him.

“Of course you are,” he said, and put the thermometer into his ear. 

She led Rodney into the room and set him up in the armchair. He had his laptop, she noticed, so she found him a power cord, and a blanket, and a cup of tea, and he settled down looking a great deal less disgruntled. 

“That’s still quite a high fever,” Beckett said, frowning and taking off the disposable tip protector. “Have you been keeping up on the ibuprofen?”

“Maybe?” John offered. 

Teyla sighed. “I will see to it that he does,” she said. “How long until the next dose?”

Beckett handed him a small plastic package. “Two now,” he said, “and two in six hours, and the fever should break by then.”

“Is it serious now?” Teyla asked. She looked calculatingly at John. Her people were accustomed to gauge the severity of a fever without a thermometer, so to her eye, he looked ill but not critically so. She bent and put her cheek against his cheek, the best way to determine if someone felt hot. He flinched, startled, as he often was when touched, and his cheek rasped hot against hers. “I would deem it noticeable but not dangerous.”

“You’re right,” Beckett said as she straightened up. He gave her an assessing look. “And yourself?”

“My fever broke a few hours ago,” she said. “I am simply tired, now.”

“Lots of fluids, plenty of rest,” Beckett said, as he’d said before. 

“And keep Rodney out of your hair,” she said, and smiled. “Of course, Carson.”

“How’s Ronon?” Beckett asked. 

“Holed up in his quarters,” Teyla said. “He hides when he is ill. I believe he will recover fastest of any of us, though it would not hurt to make sure he has eaten.”

“Will do,” Beckett said. “Call me if anyone worsens.”

“I’m very prone to complications,” Rodney said. 

“Of course you are,” Teyla said. “That is why I am giving you tea.”

Carson left, and they all settled back down. Teyla mustered enough strength to take John’s half-empty cups of tea and dump them out in the bathroom sink and collect them on the little table. That tired her out, so she sat on the foot of the bed again, a little clumsily, only to kick over her own cup of tea. Exclaiming in dismay, she cast about for something to mop it up with.

John appeared at her elbow with a towel from the bathroom. “You shouldn’t be runnin’ around takin’ care of us,” he said quietly. “It’s not your job.”

“I do not mind,” Teyla said, taking the other end of the towel and chasing the spill under the bed. “Oh dear, I truly made a mess.” There were boxes under the bed, and she could feel that the nearest one was made of a softer material, perhaps cardboard, and the tea had soaked in. She pulled it out and wiped at the bottom of it, then cleaned the floor under where it had been.

“Don’t worry about it,” John said, moving to take the box. She handed him the towel instead and carefully carried the box to the coffee table, setting it down. 

“I fear this is soaked through,” she said. It was a small box, about the width of her hands, and two or three times that in length, with a loose-fitting lid. “Is anything in here made of a material that might be harmed?”

“Ehh,” John said, “it’s a bunch of old junk.” 

“Oh no,” Teyla said in dismay, pulling the lid off, “photographs!” She knew they were damaged by water. There were a few of them, jumbled together, some in frames, some loose. She pulled out a loose one, and it was a pretty girl, brown hair wind-tossed, looking back over her shoulder, sitting on the hood of a car in front of a seashore. The bottom corner was damp, and Teyla shook her head. “The box is too wet, they will be damaged,” she said, and upended the box on the coffee table.

John made a distressed noise, but then sat down, taking the box and blotting it dry with the towel. “Aw, don’t poke through all that,” he said. “It’s old junk.”

“Why would you drag junk all the way out here?” Rodney asked. 

Something small and hard rolled out of the pile of pictures and frames and papers with a clink, and skittered off the edge of the table. “Crap,” Teyla muttered, and got down to look for it. It had rolled under the edge of the couch, and she fished for it. It was something small and round, metal, and as she pulled it out, it slipped over her finger. 

She sat up. It was a ring, a gold finger ring, unadorned, but as she pulled her finger out of it she could feel some texture inside. She looked at it. “What’s this?” she asked. It said… “Yes… I said… yes I… will… yes,” she read haltingly, pausing over the unfamiliar script.

John looked alarmed. “Give me that,” he said crossly, and held out his hand. She pulled it away from him, laughing, to tease him, and turned it over in her fingers. 

“It’s beautiful,” she said. It was a large ring, too large for her fingers, maybe big enough for John. “But what does that mean? _Yes I said yes I will yes,_ ” she read, more fluidly this time.

“It’s a quote,” Rodney said, looking up with interest. “Shit, something I read in that stupid College Lit course.” He snapped his fingers. “e. e. cummings!”

“No,” John said. He sat back, rubbing his face, resigned. “It’s the end of _Ulysses_. Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. She’s talking about when she agreed to marry her husband, the book’s protagonist. And it ends the book. It’s a great long sentence, no punctuation for almost the whole chapter. I used to know the whole end bit.” He looked down at his hands. “… _and then he asked me would I yes to say yes_ …” He paused, shook his head. “ _… and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes._ ”

“That’s quite lovely,” Teyla said, surprised. John wasn’t given much to poetry, and it sounded like poetry to her, the energy and cadence of it. 

“Oh God,” Rodney said. “It’s a wedding ring.”

“Yeah,” John said. “It’s my wedding ring.” He stood, and collected the photos into a pile. Teyla saw clearly, one of a woman in a white dress, and a man she realized was John, much younger, wearing his fancy dress uniform, and she knew he was turning prickly about this, but she couldn’t stop herself and reached for it. 

He looked at her grimly, and let go, letting her pull the framed photo to her and look at it. John was beaming, looking at the woman, who was wearing a strange headpiece with a veil; they were side by side and he had his arm around her waist and she was looking down. 

“You’re so young,” she said, tracing her finger along the edge of the frame. She had his ring looped around her thumb, hanging loose, and clicked it thoughtfully against the frame.

“I was twenty-five,” John said. “We were gonna wait longer but her father had… it was kidney disease and some other stuff, and it was killin’ him. She wanted him to walk her down the aisle, so we moved the date up. We’d been planning to wait until I’d been home from deployment a little while but instead this was like… we came back late from deployment and I was goin’ outta my mind that we’d miss the damn date, but I’d been home about twenty-four hours at that point. Can you see, on my face, I still have a wicked goggle tan. I’d been in Iraq.”

“What were you doing in Iraq?” Rodney demanded. “That would’ve been what, 1994?”

“Ninety-six, Rodney,” John said, “and the US Air Force spent a decade patrolling that no-fly zone. That was back when I flew jets, not choppers. And actually the reason I got into choppers in the first place because let me tell you, flying jets in Iraq was boring as fuck.” 

Teyla put the photo down in her lap and turned the ring over, reading the words again. “This is beautiful,” she said. “What’s a wedding ring?”

“Oh,” Rodney said. He looked at John, who was leafing through the photos, and then back at Teyla. “On Earth, when people get married, they exchange rings as part of the ceremony.” He gestured vaguely. “I sort of thought… when you get divorced, don’t you… what do you do with the rings?”

John glanced up. “I dunno what you’re supposed to do,” he said. “I didn’t want the ones back I’d given her. The engagement ring was nothing special. I mean, I spent all the money I had on it, missed a car payment, it was a whole, well, calculated mess. I knew what I was doin’. But by the time we divorced I really didn’t care anymore. She has it, or sold it, or threw it out, I really don’t know. The wedding ring was definitely nothing fancy, we were broke as hell by then paying for a wedding so much sooner than we’d budgeted on, though my dad wound up paying for a whole chunk of it without telling me.” He shrugged. “I dunno. I didn’t offer to give the ring back, and didn’t ask for mine back.” 

Teyla held it out to him. “I should not have pried,” she said belatedly. “But it was so beautiful. I love the phrase.”

John took the ring and looked down at it for a moment, wobbling a little, then sat down. He sighed. “Me too,” he said. “She was an English major. She loved shit like that.” He fidgeted with it, slid it onto the third finger of his left hand, looked at it, made a face, pulled it off. “And then no she said no she would not, so, that was the end of that.” He tossed the ring back into the box, dumped the pile of pictures back into it, and put the lid back on. “What do you do with this shit? You can’t throw it out. Almost ten years I was with her, married for seven of ‘em.”

Teyla had a suspicion. “How long before Atlantis did you divorce?”

John picked the box up, stood up, and shot Teyla a glance. “Year, year and a half,” he said. He stuffed the box back under the bed and caught himself, obviously light-headed, as he straightened up again. He sat on the foot of the bed and coughed, a terrible racking sound. 

Teyla sat beside him and embraced him. He was sick enough, and tired enough, that he let her, not tensing or trying to pull away or getting awkward. “I am sorry,” she said softly. “I did not mean to pry.”

“It’s all right when it’s you,” John said a bit gruffly, resting his hand on her arm where it was looped around his chest. He coughed again, covering his mouth with the inside of his elbow and turning his face away from Teyla, then laughed. “But I can tell Rodney must really be sicker than Beckett thinks he is, since he’s kept his mouth shut so long.”

“Hey,” Rodney said. “I… wait, you really think so?”

“You’ll be all right, buddy,” John said. “We’ll all be all right.”


End file.
